With “Reindeer Baby”, Richard Gadd (34) has created one of the most successful Netflix series of the year so far. In the seven-part production, the series creator and author not only plays the main role, the script for the series is also based on his own, quite complicated, experiences with a real stalker. Now the series creator explained that he feels pity for the woman who once stalked him and bombarded him with thousands of emails and calls.
“I struggle with some kind of toxic empathy problem,” Gadd said at an event on Tuesday (May 7), according to People. Despite the “relentless” stalking, which “felt like it was everywhere” and left him feeling like his life was “not really functional,” he had “these incredible bouts of pity for her,” Gadd explained.
“She said something in one of those voicemails and I thought, ‘Oh my God, at the end of the day she’s just someone in a lot of pain,'” the actor elaborated. He therefore thought it was important to convey the story with sympathy. “I never saw anyone who was a villain. I saw someone who was lost by the system. I saw someone who needed help and wasn’t getting it,” he added.
Shortly after the release of “Reindeer Baby,” resourceful Internet detectives tracked down the woman who had been stalking Gadd for months. The actor then asked viewers in a statement on Instagram not to speculate about the true identities of the characters in “Baby Reindeer.” “That’s not the point of our show,” he wrote. In an interview with the British “Guardian” he also said that he had changed some events to “create dramatic climaxes”, but that everything was based on real events from his life.
The woman who is said to have inspired the character Martha Scott (played by Jessica Gunning, 38) has since spoken out in numerous interviews. She told the Daily Mail that she would consider filing a defamation lawsuit against Gadd because she had received “death threats and insults” from fans of the show. She accused Gadd of using the series “to stalk me and bully an older woman on television for fame and fortune.”
And that’s not all: As the British TV presenter Piers Morgan (59) now announced, the “real” Martha from “Reindeer Baby” was a guest on his show “Piers Morgan Uncensored”. “She gave me her first TV interview about the Netflix hit and wants to speak out and set the record straight,” Morgan wrote on the X platform on May 8th. The interview is scheduled to air on Thursday evening (May 9th). .
